A Month of Sundays

As usual, John Updike does not disappoint. This book will slowly draw you in and at times you wonder if you are disgusted with the protagonist or do you feel sorry for him (much like Humbert in Lolita). Then there are times that you feel you are being gas-lighted and seduced. The book touches deeply on human nature and the addiction to the sexual drive. I would recommend it as an easy read, especially for John Updike aficionados.

"A Month of Sundays" gives a first-glance impression of being a tossed-off trifle, as if a bit of Updike's light verse had grown fat and sassy, full-bellied, and was given room to stretch like a self-satisfied cat on a windowsill. After reaching the pinnacle of bookish prestige (which included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 and a National Book Award for "The Centaur"), Updike opted to indulge his less sober-minded self with this arch and witty first-person narrative from the perspective of a man who shares Humbert-Humbert's literary, if not sexual, tendencies. Indeed, "A Month of Sundays" nods to Nabokov in its delight in puns, wordplay, mental calisthenics, and self-confessional musings, while still featuring the dominant themes and characteristics of Updike's prose. The author's mouthpiece is one Revered Tom Marshfield, the minister of a New England parish who exhibits an Updikean capacity for close observation, philosophical speculation, psychological penetration, and penetration of another kind all together. We find him on the first page settling down with a sheaf of blank sheets of paper--a month's worth. "Sullying them is to be my sole therapy," Marshfield writes, already indicating the thematic and aesthetic direction the novel will take with the sole/soul pun, not to mention the verb "to sully," foreshadowing Marshfield's association of writing with sex and seduction. Here's the format, then, neatly laid out: thirty-one chapters, one for each day of a month, with each chapter comprising a morning's worth of Tom Marshfield's musings on the subjects of life, death, sex, God, husbands and wives, adultery, Karl Barth, fathers and sons, faith, skepticism, Christianity, and how a man may be defined by his golf swing. Yes, we are in Updike territory. The right Rev. Marshield spirals inwards towards the center of his marshy confusion, arriving at the edge of self-understanding but never quite there. In a Graham Greene-like formulation, Updike equates faith to being hunted by God, "a feeling of being closely, urgently cherished by a Predator, whose success will have something rapturous about it, even for me." "A Month of Sundays" is a heavy meal served in dainty dishes on fine China. The prose sparkles, even if the Nabokovian wordplay is occasionally strained. Updike sounds every note in his repertoire, and the result is a Bach-like sonata--breezy, unassuming, consummately professional, but also witty, intellectual, and profound in passages. And for the discerning reader, "A Month of Sundays" serves as a kind of Rosetta Stone for Updike's fiction, an index pointing to all his chief concerns, themes, and character types. Here are a few nuggets of the Wit and Wisdom of John Updike on display: On parenthood: "Society in its conventional wisdom sets a term to childhood; of parenthood there is no riddance. Though the child be a sleek Senator of seventy, and the parent a twisted husk mounted in a wheelchair, the wreck must still gra

This is a fabulous book. It marries esoteric philosophy and ultimate, base humanity better than any book I've ever read. This combination gives it the ammunition to truly shoot to the core of a reader. And I found it quite easy to read.

I found this book absolutely amazing. Though the Rev. Tom Marshfield is utterly despisable, he is also completely endearing. The prose is masterfully written. I only found it difficult during the first 3 pages. Updikes knowledge of theology impressed me, as well as his indepth treatment of the subject. Updikes juxtapositioning of sex (seen usually as profane) and theology gives this novel its unique edge. Highly recommended reading for anyone who has dared to ask the hard questions of religion and to search them out, and has suffered morally and spiritually as a result.

Updike is not usually this difficult to read. In terms of its prose, this is one of his more spectacular, elusive and confusing books. A lot of the time, this book reminded me more of Anthony Burgess than John Updike. What is distinctively Updikian about it is its engagement with certain problems in the Christian faith. Among the questions the book seems to ask are: Is God detectable or undetectable in the fabric of our lives? Why does God apparently allow suffering (that old chestnut)? Above all: what exactly is the relationship between Christianity and sexuality? Is sex sacred or prophane? The book answers and fails to answer all these questions and more in its complex, uncertain unravelling. I myself did not really feel adequate to its challenge and I did find the language pitched too high for me. But it's a fascinating book all the same.